Re: Amazon

> From: "auwg" 
> <snip>
> > 
> > The old publishing model and those who support it can go the way of the dinosaurs.
> > Ed
> > Ed Howdershelt - Abintra Press
> > Science Fiction & Semi-Fiction
> > http://www.AbintraPress.com
> > 
> 
> I wonder Ed. There are different aspects to this. On the business side the power is with the big battalions. On the publishing side selling always has been and remains, a gamble. And the ability of the very big and the very small to co-exist is a feature of business and marketing.
> 
> One of the biggest problems for small publishers is that the main market is through Amazon. Amazon is the focus of constant complaints for its treatment of small publishers. And it has shown an amazing ability to set any terms it likes for small publishers. The Kindle is a subset with a large and active captive readership [through its DRM].

Good, bad, or indifferent, you have to credit Amazon; the Kindle was the turning point. And it wasn't the Kindle itself, it was the fact that Amazon solved the _real_ problems inhibiting eBook adoption. The first and most important was lack of title availability. For all previous eBooks, title availability was a joke. eBookshops were like airport bookstores, if the question was "can I find something, anything to read," the answer was "yes," but if the question was "can I find specific book X" the question was usually "no." Barbara Kingsolver's books were a conspicuous example, and I just checked, and as I expected--in fact, take for granted--all the title I'm familiar with are available in Kindle editions.

The second, alas imperfectly solved, was price, but at least Amazon managed to break through the greedy insanity of pricing new titles in eBook at hardbound prices.

If there is a large enough eBook market to be worthy of marketing to, it will be largely because of Amazon and the Kindle.

I wonder if Bezos was actually enough of a visionary to be looking ahead to eBooks, if he consciously was thinking about them as his real reason for starting Amazon? "Someday soon there will be eBooks and a large, mainstream, internet bookstore will be in the best position to make the transition?" 



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